Obituary

Broadcast giant Gowdy dies

By wire services
Published February 21, 2006

WEST PALM BEACH - Curt Gowdy was such a prized and versatile sports broadcaster in his prime that NBC and ABC simultaneously shared his talents. And he was such a professional that he made the arrangement seem routine. Casual, even.

For all the great sports moments he narrated to the nation, from World Series drama to Super Bowl fireworks to the slippery slope of the Olympic ski jump, Mr. Gowdy never sounded like anything more than a close and trusted friend at the microphone - or felt like anything less to a generation of fans.

Mr. Gowdy died Monday (Feb. 20, 2006) at his winter home in Palm Beach after a long bout with leukemia. He was 86.

"I tried to pretend that I was sitting in the stands with a buddy watching a game, poking him in the ribs when something exciting happened," Mr. Gowdy said in 1984 at the time of his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. "I never took myself too seriously. An announcer is only as good as yesterday's performance."

He had lived in Palm Beach since 1988 with Jerre, his wife of 56 years.

Mr. Gowdy made his broadcasting debut in 1944 and went on to call the first Super Bowl in 1967 as well as 13 World Series and 16 All-Star games.

"He's certainly the greatest play-by-play person up to this point that NBC sports has ever had," NBC Universal Sports chairman Dick Ebersol said from the Turin Olympics. "He literally carried the sports division at NBC for so many years on his back. ... He was a remarkable talent and he was an even more remarkable human being."

Curtis Edward Gowdy was born July 31, 1919, in Green River, Wyo. When he was 6, the family moved to Cheyenne, where his father, Edward Curtis Gowdy, taught him an appreciation for fishing and hunting in America's wildest and most beautiful regions.

Mr. Gowdy's mother, Ruth, stressed education - she gave him a library card and required him to read one book a week.

"She said, "You must build up your vocabulary, and the only way to do it is to read,"' Mr. Gowdy once recalled.

Cheyenne was also where he called his first sports event, a six-man high school football game on an unmarked lot in 1943. Mr. Gowdy was stunned to find only a pair of soapboxes at the field, one with a microphone and another for him to sit on. There were no rosters or uniform numbers, so he made up the names of the players, using those of men he knew in college or the Army Air Corps.

A few years later he called University of Oklahoma football games for a radio station in Oklahoma City, where he met his future wife, Geraldine "Jerre" Ophelia Dawkins, a graduate student at the school.

Mr. Gowdy later became Mel Allen's broadcast partner on Yankees games in 1949 before leaving to be the radio voice of the Red Sox from 1951-66.

"When I would be doing the Rose Bowl, the Super Bowl or the World Series," Mr. Gowdy later said, "I would think back to that vacant lot and those two soapboxes and realize how lucky I was to get started in broadcasting."

He left the Red Sox job in 1966 for a 10-year stint as Game of the Week announcer for NBC. He also created, produced and hosted American Sportsman on ABC for 20 years.

Veteran NBC broadcaster Dick Enberg said that if Gowdy were calling a game, "you knew it was a major event."

"He's the last of the dinosaurs. No one will ever be the voice of so many major events at the same time ever again," Enberg said.

Former Red Sox star Johnny Pesky, speaking from Boston's spring training camp in Fort Myers, remembered Gowdy as "a peach of a guy."

Mr. Gowdy has been inducted into 20 Halls of Fame and in 1970 was the first sportscaster to earn the Peabody Award for Outstanding Journalistic Achievement.

"Hey, I had a time," Mr. Gowdy told the Palm Beach Post in 2000. "So wonderful. I can't find words. I married the most beautiful girl in Oklahoma. Three wonderful kids, Yankees, Red Sox, presidents, Olympics, champs and championships, movie stars, Bing Crosby, fishing the Florida Keys, New Zealand, back home in Wyoming. What a time. Can't beat it."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Gowdy is survived by daughter Cheryl Ann, of Palm Beach; sons Curt Jr. of New Canaan, Conn., and Trevor of Beverly Farms, Mass.; and five grandchildren.

A wake will be held Wednesday in Palm Beach and the funeral is Saturday in Boston.

-Information from the Associated Press and the Palm Beach Post was used in this report.

[Last modified February 21, 2006, 17:30:54]